J. K. Rowling tells the truth in her fiction. Her twitter feed is another matter. Perhaps the limitations of the genre don’t allow her to communicate the nuance, sensitivity, and charity that characterize her fiction. Whatever the case, there’s a chasm between what she writes in her novels and what she tweets.

In her fiction, Rowling treats even Voldemort sympathetically. She takes nothing away from the evil he chooses to pursue, nor does she make the reader delight in his wickedness. What she does is put the reader in position to understand how Voldemort got to be so bad. She shows us the way he was wronged, helps us understand how needy he felt, and traces the steps he took—wrong steps, selfish steps, willful steps—that led him down the path of cruelty. Voldemort is evil, but Rowling presents him such that her readers understand the choices he made even as they hope for his demise. We feel sad that Tom Riddle chose so poorly, even as we love the good things he seeks to destroy. He’s the villain pure and simple, but still it can be said: J. K. Rowling loves Voldemort and respects him. She treats him with the honor and dignity due to a human being, even one who has literally dehumanized himself.

Perhaps, in spite of what she tweets, she has a similar understanding and sympathy for those whose politics differ from her own.

It seems to me that the twitter feed has led to some mistaken impressions about the meaning of the literature. Ross Douthat takes the Harry Potter stories as an allegory about the ruling elite’s struggle to deal with flyover country. Hillary Clinton thinks they instill progressive values in the young. Others have referred to the Potter stories as “secular” and suggested that their worldview is thin.

In what follows I want to argue that J. K. Rowling’s Christianity comes through profoundly in her fiction (the CormoranStrikenovels included) in a way that subverts the worldview of the political left and softens callused hearts on the right. The deep meaning of the stories, however, transcends today’s political streetfights, tells the truth about the world, challenges the secular premises of our age, and insures that these novels will stand with the greats of the western literary canon.

A Secular Age?

Charles Taylor has described the “buffered self” and the “expressive individualism” of the “exclusive humanism” of our culture. These terms describe the way many in our culture try to explain the world without any appeal to the divine or the transcendent (exclusive humanism), the way people live for themselves rather than for God, nation, or family (expressive individualism), and the way people think they are not vulnerable to influences beyond what they can see (buffered self).

Who embodies these secular perspectives in the Potter stories? Well, the Dursleys refuse to believe in magic, even after they have the pig’s tail removed from Ickle Diddykins, and Lord Voldemort lives only for himself, to extend his life however many people he must kill, however he must rip his own soul to shreds. J. K. Rowling is not exactly lionizing the progressive ideal.

The Potterverse is not the kind of place where everything that exists can be explained by scientific analysis, naturalistic evolution, and materialistic determinism. The Hogwarts saga is set in a world full of magic, a world not so much different from one in which, to borrow from N. D. Wilson, “Apple trees turn flowers into apples using sunlight and air.” J. K. Rowling’s world is full of magic, just like the one we inhabit. (By the way, the magic in the Potter stories is just like the magic in Narnia and Middle Earth. This is not the kind of magic the Bible condemns, which seeks to manipulate demonic powers. Rather, people who do magic in these stories have gifts, abilities, and they choose to use their gifts for good or bad causes).

Charles Taylor also spoke of the “cross pressure” people feel when the divine and the transcendent foist themselves on those trying to live in a world without anything like God. J. K. Rowling’s stories are saying to all such people, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

The Progressive Worldview Subverted?

If there is anything that characterizes the left, it’s the idea that government can and should address the world’s problems. With the right people in power, the correct values imposed on the populace, and the best political system enacted, just outcomes can be insured for all people. Well, at least all the people the government deems worthy of justice.

If there is anything that characterizes the Harry Potter stories (and the Cormoran Strike novels), it’s the idea that no one should look to the government to fix anything. The government in the Harry Potter stories is worse than just neutral, it’s populated by fools and supporters of the Dark Lord, pursues cruel and wicked policies, and eventually becomes Voldemort’s own tool. In the Cormoran Strike novels, the authorities bumble along drawing wrong conclusions, resisting the force of truth, and impeding the course of justice.

Are these kinds of stories we expect from someone who believes the government can fix everything? For the left, the government replaces God, and politics replace religion. Not so in J. K. Rowling’s fiction. In her fiction, the government values itself, not the people. What the government seeks to do is make itself look good and maintain its own power not make life better for the people. And when things finally do get better in a Rowling novel, whether it’s the downfall of Voldemort or the solving of a crime, the achievement belongs not to government but to individuals who love truth, goodness, and beauty and risk their own lives for things that matter more than their own safety.

For progressives, the media—newspapers, journalists, talking heads—are looked to as a source of truth. People look to the news to find out what is happening and for help in processing how to respond. Information, values, opinions, and feelings are all shaped by those who do the reporting.

For J. K. Rowling in her fiction, the media are a pack of self-serving wolves preying on the populace. They live under the thumb of the government and are easily manipulated by anyone with power or money. In both the Potter and Strike novels, the press is mainly interested in clickbait, not truth. The Daily Prophet won’t, or can’t, report what is really happening. It opposes the good guys and shapes the opinions of the public in favor of Lord Voldemort against Harry Potter. The press in the Strike novels are bloodthirsty paparazzi and reporters who delight in ruining people’s lives.

Most people in the Potter stories and the Strike novels are treated sympathetically by J. K. Rowling. Not so with government officials or members of the media.

Whatever might be concluded from her twitter feed or other public statements she makes, in her fiction J. K. Rowling teaches that no one should expect help from the government, and no one should expect truth from the media.

Softening Hard-Hearts on the Right?

Have you read the Potter stories? Have you re-read them? (You can thank me when you’ve done so.) Have you noticed how your sympathy for different characters deepens as you encounter and re-encounter them? You sympathize with a werewolf, you lament that Tom Riddle’s mom didn’t love him the way Harry’s did, you see how Hagrid’s optimistic devotion tames Grawp, you feel the force of what Hermione says about house elves as you come to know Dobby and Creature, and you rejoice at the way Harry Potter honored two of the bravest men he’d ever known, headmasters of Hogwarts, one a vampire, the other outed by his author as gay.

Having said all this, it must be said again: in no way does J. K. Rowling provoke an appetite for evil. She shows what evil does, it gets people killed, people we love, people we know are needed by characters we care about.

In the Potter stories, love is the greatest magic. So Rowling said she always thought of Dumbledore as gay. He’s a celibate, single, wise old man who repeatedly refused the post of Minister of Magic (because he didn’t trust himself with power, and because government never does good). Dumbledore never gives any indication that he wants to redefine morality, and he even takes steps to protect himself from becoming too attached to his students, in the process protecting them from his own weakness. If I may be allowed to put it this way, Albus Dumbledore looks like a man who embraces traditional Christian morality who is struggling well against same sex attraction.

The reader who sees all this will grow in understanding, sympathy, and have his hard heart softened. But nothing in the Harry Potter stories or Cormoran Strike novels redefines morality, promotes a sexual or moral revolution, or advocates government takeover.

Telling the Truth about the World

If this has not been controversial enough, let me suggest that in Career of Evil, under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith, J. K. Rowling has subverted the premise that undergirds all things Trans—transgender, transable, transracial, transwhatever. She accomplishes this through the fact that the main character of the stories, Cormoran Strike, lost half a leg in the war in Afghanistan.

In the course of an investigation, Strike comes into contact with people from the “transabled” community dealing with “Body Integrity Disorder.” These people want to have parts of their bodies amputated—working parts of their bodies.

The people Strike encounters have heard lies about Strike. They have been told that Strike was not injured in the war but is like them, someone who “needed” to have a working part of his body removed. As if a human “needs” to be disabled. The audience naturally sympathizes with Strike, and Rowling rehearses how as he recovered in the hospital he saw so many men who had been disabled, men who would have preferred to have been whole.

Strike’s reaction to the transabled is bracingly real. His assessment is that such people do not need help having body parts removed, they need mental and emotional help.

I submit that this fictional account argues that people should not seek to remove body parts or alter their sexual or racial identity but embrace what God has made them to be.

Great Literature

So much more could be said about these novels and topics, but I will conclude by echoing the sentiment of the Dean of Harry Potter Scholars, Hogwarts Professor John Granger: J. K. Rowling is the Charles Dickens of our time, and Harry Potter is the “shared text” of the 21st century. As of May 2013, the series had sold more than 500 million copies worldwide, making it the best selling series in history, and there is no indication that it’s losing steam. Go to your local bookstore and note the many prominent displays of Harry Potter books.

From open to close, the series is about the greatest kind of love, the kind where people lay down their lives for others. Moreover, there is an alchemical undercurrent of meaning that lies below the surface of the gripping stories. That undercurrent is all about Harry Potter being refined in the fires of testing until he has been transformed from base metal to pure gold. The pure gold is Christlikeness, as Harry Potter’s furious desire to live takes the form of his readiness to die.

I love these stories. I talk about the Harry Potter novels all the time—to my kids, in my teaching and preaching, and with friends, and I’m eagerly anticipating Book 4 in the Cormoran Strike series. If you’ve not yet read Harry Potter, you are in for such a treat. These books will make you better: better at loving, better at living, and better at worshiping God the Father through Christ the Son in the power of the Spirit.

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This morning I received an email from Airbnb on their new Church Covenant, er, “community commitment.” As I have settled convictions against their statement of faith and cannot live by their church covenant, I am happy to resign my membership in their church. I do so with the following open letter:

Dear Airbnb,

Your new community commitment discriminates against any person of the historic faiths of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity who remains committed to the moral teaching of those faiths.

Christianity and Judaism uphold the sanctity of marriage as a union of one man and one woman, and like Christianity and Judaism, Islam holds that God created human beings as male and female.

Your new policy on “discrimination” and “bias” does nothing but embrace the “bias” of those who believe other things—things pertaining to transgenderism and gay marriage.

So you may think that your policy is enlightened and kind, but all you have really done is trade one set of moral standards for a different set.

And in the application of your new moral standards, you are not achieving your “commitment” to “treat everyone . . . with respect, and without judgment or bias.” Instead, you are exercising “bias” and acting on a moral “judgment” that condemns everyone who adheres to the teaching of Christianity and Judaism (and at points Islam, which holds to the gender binary, condemns homosexual activity, but also embraces polygamy).

You are biased. Your policy is judgmental. And your new morality will be far more harmful than the one you have rejected in favor of this new moral code that belongs only to the religious adherents of late-modern secularism.

I refuse to commit myself to your newly invented moral code, which has been dictated by the false gods of secularism. In my view, your gods are no gods, and your worship of them is merely idolatry. You may, of course, cancel my Airbnb account.

Sincerely,

James M. Hamilton Jr.

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Susie Meister has explained how studying religion made her a liberal, with the result that she left the right, stopped voting Republican, and started voting Democrat. I want to provide an accurate summary of her concerns and try to provide the kind of things I would say in response if I knew her: if I was a trusted friend, her brother, or her pastor.

Summary

A lot of her post is personal narrative about how she campaigned for Bush, “represented the worldview of conservative evangelicals” on an MTV reality show, and then went off to study religion at the University of Pittsburgh. She talks about how people at her church warned her about liberal university influence, and of her confidence that: “surely a faith as strong as mine could stand up to academic scrutiny.”

She explains that “what happened . . . wasn’t an abandonment of [her] faith, but a shift in [her] understanding of Scripture.” From what she says in her post, she appears to have shifted from believing everything the Bible teaches (the position of her un-schooled Sunday School teachers) to believing the parts of it that would be embraced at the University of Pittsburgh. She describes reading the Bible “through unfiltered eyes” and learning “about scholarly investigation.” In the end: “[the evangelicals’] old Jesus looked nothing like [her] new Jesus.”

How did her new Jesus differ? She could “no longer reconcile

Jesus’s calls for non-judgment

loving your enemies

and taking up your cross

“with many of the Religious Right’s positions on

social services

women’s rights

and the LGBT community

She goes on to relate how “increased reading of the Bible correlated with greater passion for social justice–a trait typically associated with liberalism.” She describes her “worldview fall[ing] apart like a house of cards,” and states, “Now I no longer identify as an evangelical, but I study them for a living.”

She writes,

“Only after my doctrinal evolution did I realize I no longer aligned with the political conservatism for which I once literally campaigned. Jesus was a champion of the poor, the weak, the meek, and downtrodden. He encouraged his followers to ‘sell their possessions’ and give them to the poor. He hung out with hookers and crooks. The lifestyle of Jesus didn’t look anything like the politics of the Right.”

She voices some other concerns about the hypocrisy of evangelicals supporting the likes of Ronald Reagan the divorcee, Mitt Romney the Mormon, and Donald Trump the bragging adulterer. She concludes, “The life of Jesus simply didn’t reflect the agenda of the political right, so now neither could I.”

Response

I suspect that many people resonate with Susie’s concerns, and I don’t want to be antagonistic in the way that I address them. Let’s be friendly, and let’s talk about the ideas and issues, isolating them and understanding the choices that we’re all making.

As I listen to Susie, I hear four concerns that I would like to discuss with her. The first has to do with the way that Jesus lived, with his instruction to “judge not” in Matthew 7:1, and with “the Right” that Susie left behind. The second has to do with the shift she describes in her understanding of Scripture, the third with the relationship between the Bible and worldview, and the fourth with the influence of our families, our communities, and our teachers.

1. Jesus, Hookers and Crooks, Non-Judgment, and the Right

Susie is right that Jesus was a friend of sinners–and praise God for it! We’re all sinners, and what a relief that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Tim 2:5).

But what Susie doesn’t mention is that while Jesus engaged people where they were, he never left them there. Jesus told that woman he defended (it’s not clear the woman in John 8:1–11 was a prostitute) to go and sin no more (John 8:11).

That very passage also addresses the “non-judgment” issue. The defense Jesus provided for that woman against those who would stone her relied upon him judging that what those accusing her were doing was not right and them being convinced by his righteous appeal to the truth. The words of Jesus in Matthew 7:1 cannot mean: never make any kind of moral judgment. If they did, Jesus could never have told that woman (or anyone else) to stop sinning. But Jesus tells everyone to stop sinning–that’s a lot of judging going on!

Even the context of the statement in Matthew 7 shows that the words of Jesus can’t mean “never make any moral evaluations,” because Jesus immediately speaks of seeing specks (moral imperfections) in other people’s eyes. He doesn’t say “let’s all pretend those specks aren’t there,” but rather “get the log out of your own eye before you address he speck in your neighbor’s” (paraphrase of Matt 7:3–5).

Jesus is telling people not to be overly judgmental and ungenerous and self-righteous. Everyone makes moral assessments and comes to conclusions that can only be regarded as judgments. Susie does so in her post–she concludes that the judgments made by the left, for instance, are superior to those of the right.

I’m not a shill for the Republican Party, and this post is not for defending what they do.

I do have some questions, though, about life, sexual morality and marriage, and the economy that I hope Susie will consider:

Life

Jesus taught us to treat others the way we would want to be treated. Doesn’t this extend to the way we treat unborn children in the wombs of their mothers?

Susie rightly mentions that Jesus was a champion of the weak–is anyone weaker than the defenseless child in its mother’s womb? If Jesus is their champion we should do what we can to protect them too, right?

Sexual Morality

Jesus taught that God the creator made man male and female and said that the two should become one flesh (Matt 19:4–5). If we agree with Jesus, won’t we believe that the only appropriate way for humans to engage in sexual activity is within the context of a covenant of marriage between one man and one woman, right?

Would Susie agree that the Bible treats all sexual activity outside of marriage as sinful? Would she agree that the weak are the ones who are most often exploited and victimized by extra-marital sexual activity?

The Economy

The commands not to steal and not to covet make some assumptions, right? Don’t they assume that people are going to own things? (true socialism abolishes private property and everything is owned by the state). And don’t these commands also assume that other people are going to have some things we would like to have ourselves? (that is, isn’t the Bible forbidding certain responses to income inequality?).

Is it possible for the government to make things better? Are people who want the government to fix the world’s problems putting government in the place of God?

2. Understanding of Scripture

Susie talks about reading Scripture through “unfiltered eyes,” but none of us is really capable of this. We all have some kind of filter. I wonder if perhaps Susie has replaced a Sunday School filter with what she learned at the University of Pittsburgh?

If we believe everything the Bible teaches, we won’t be captive to either the right or the left, the Democrat or Republican Party. We will have concerns that overlap with some on both the left and right, and then we will have to rank those concerns in order of importance.

The life of the unborn, the definition of marriage, and the free exercise of religion–the right to live out our faith–are the weightiest concerns facing our civilization. At present those concerns are shared by the Republican Party and not the Democrat Party. I wish the Democrat Party would share those concerns. It would make life better for everyone.

3. The Bible and Worldview

Susie speaks of having her “worldview fall apart like a house of cards,” and I suspect this was a direct result of the “shift in [her] understanding if Scripture.” God gave us the Bible as a worldview building book. If Susie became convinced that the Bible was not totally true and trustworthy, or if the “scholarly investigation” she learned about left the Bible in rubbles, then it would only be natural for her worldview to fall apart.

Every one of those challenges to the unity of the Bible can be answered. And I suspect that if Susie’s confidence in the Bible were to be restored, she would see that the house of cards was not the Biblical worldview she abandoned but the new one she replaced it with.

4. The Influence of Family, Community, and Teachers

There is more to Susie’s story than she related in her short post. But from that post it appears that at one time her church community held primary influence in her life and thinking, and then that primary influence shifted to a new community whose values she now shares.

She wrote, “surely a faith as strong as mine could stand up to academic scrutiny.” The issue is not whether her faith could stand the scrutiny but whether the truth claims she believed would be defended and maintained.

The reason Susie’s church family warned her about the liberal influence of the academy is that the liberals in the academy defend their own conclusions not the ones Susie formerly believed.

The history of ideas demonstrates that people will believe bad things if good things are not explained, defended, illustrated, and applied.

The problem was not a lack of faith on Susie’s part but the lack of diversity in secular universities. I suspect there is not a single evangelical who holds to the inerrancy of the Scriptures at the University of Pittsburgh. No one should be surprised when a school’s graduates believe what its faculty advocates.

So Susie, I hope and pray that you will reconsider the Bible. If those who defend it convince you that it stands, and it does, you might find yourself in a better place than on the left or the right. That is, you might find yourself in the arms of the Jesus of the Bible, at home in the true church.

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Edward Rothstein asks, “Whose History Is It, Anyway?” in the Wall Street Journal, and don’t miss this important section on the recent movie “Selma”:

“Selma” is more complicated. You might conclude from the film that President Lyndon Johnson’s staff was untrustworthy on civil rights, while Johnson himself was actually nefarious, regardeding Martin Luther King Jr. with nasty condescension. “You listen to me!” he scolds King. “I am sick and tired of you demanding and telling me what I can and can’t do!” As punishment for King’s uppityness, he sics J. Edgar Hoover on him.

None of this is true. And this is not a negligible distortion. King’s conversations with Johnson are crucial: Legislative success justifies King’s strategy. So why is Johnson turned into a near villain, seeing light only when King forces his hand? “I wasn’t interested in making a white-savior movie,” Ms. DuVernay has said. “Black people,” she has asserted, “should tell their own stories from their own perspectives.” She wanted a history in which African-Americans determined their own fates instead of seeming like passive recipients of Johnson’s good will. So instead we have Johnson’s bad will. Ms. Du Vernay alters history in order to control it; we hear the gears clanking, nearly undermining the powerful history she gets right.

“Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor . . .” (Eph 4:25).

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Have you heard references to the “failed policies of the past”? I always wonder if they think, as it seems, that freedom is the failed policy of the past. It seems that many in our culture want to replace freedom with more governmental control of all of life.

Ironically, that’s the failed policy of the past.

John Lewis Gaddis recounts how the Communists in China decided to bring “hope and change” to their people on the basis of what “science” called them to do as they pursued their “progressive” policies as “history marched forward” to a better future for the people:

Then [Mao] decided on something even more dramatic: he would merge the industrialization and collectivization campaigns by transforming peasants into proletarians after all, but by means that went beyond anything Stalin had ever considered. He ordered farmers throughout China to abandon their crops, build furnaces in their backyards, throw in their own furniture as fuel, melt down their agricultural implements–and produce steel.

The result of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” was the greatest single human calamity of the 20th century. Stalin’s campaign to collectivize agriculture had caused between 5 and 7 million people to starve to death during the 1930s. Mao now sextupled that record, producing a famine that between 1958 and 1961 took the lives of over 30 million people, by far the worst on record anywhere ever.

Matthew Vines doesn’t throw his knockout punch at the beginning of his book but at the end. The book’s final sentence says of condoning same-sex relations as moral and good: “As more believers are coming to realize, it is indeed a requirement of Christian faithfulness” (183, italics his).

With these words, Vines hopes to send to the mat, down for the count, the view that has been held by the people of God ever since God made them male and female and said “the two shall become one flesh” (Matt 19:4–5; cf. Gen 2:24 LXX). The Law of Moses clearly prohibits same-sex relations (Lev 18:22; 20:13), and that prohibition is reinforced in the New Testament (Rom 1:26–27; 1 Cor 6:9–10; 1 Tim 1:10).

How could Vines possibly hope to convince Christians that faithfulness to God requires them to champion what God forbids?

Vines employs an old, subtle strategy, asking “Did God actually say?” (Gen 3:1). Calling for a re-examination of the Bible’s teaching, Vines doesn’t come out swinging but wooing. He tells his own heart-wrenching story, winning sympathy because he obviously did not want to admit his own same-sex attraction. Vines relates that his father told him the day he “came out” was the worst day of his life. With readers softened up by sentiment and compassion, Vines humbly asks them to reconsider the Bible’s teaching.

His attempt to convince readers that they should condone what God has condemned is a study in sophistry. Sadly, those who lack a firm foundation in the Scriptures, those who do not take up the Berean task of examining the Scriptures for themselves (cf. Acts 17:11), and those who do not examine the logic of Vines’ arguments (to say nothing of those who want Vines to be right) might think the traditional view of marriage has been floored, like Mike Tyson at the hands of Buster Douglas.

But has it?

Tellingly, Vines does not encourage his readers to be Bereans. He can’t afford to have readers test his arguments against the Scriptures. For people to endorse as righteous what the Bible says is sin, they must rely on the account of the Bible that Vines gives. To argue that people can do exactly what the Bible prohibits, Vines proceeds as others have before him:

isolate a small number of texts that speak directly to the issue;

extract those texts from the wider thought-world in which they fit, replacing it with contemporary standards and expectations;

use “evidence” that supports the case, whether that entails the reinterpretation of a few words or makes appeals to purported historical backgrounds that informed the author of the text but are irrelevant today;

Every time Vines suggests that those who hold the Bible’s teaching have caused gay people pain, he assumes his conclusion that the Bible does not treat all same-sex relations as inherently sinful. Every time he dismisses the sexual complementarity of the created order, he rejects the thought-world of the biblical authors. Every time he quotes Greek or Roman authors to show that they viewed women as inferior to men, he imports a false background, smuggling in a thought-world foreign to the biblical authors.

On this shifting sand of failed logic and bad use of evidence Vines builds his house: the conclusion that what the Bible condemns as sinful must now be celebrated as righteous. Justice requires it. But Christians believe that God determines the meaning of justice; that in the Bible God has revealed what justice is.

Vines engages in a kind of deconstruction of the Bible’s teaching by isolating the six texts (only six! the gullible exclaim with surprise) that speak explicitly on this issue. Having divided, he seeks to conquer by reinterpreting these passages. Countering his attack requires understanding these texts in context, understanding them in the wider symbolic universe the biblical authors built with their words. If that seems complicated, take an example from The Hobbbit and The Lord of the Rings. If we are to understand the significance of the ring of power, we must see how it fits in the context of the story Tolkien tells. In the same way, understanding what the biblical authors show and tell about same-sex relations requires setting their statements against the big story that unfolds in the Bible.

Vines gives lip service to the wider context of the biblical portrait, showing just enough awareness of it to create the impression that he has accounted for it. For his case to stand, however, he cannot allow the full force of the wider story to be felt. That would destroy his argument.

Are you uncertain about whether these things are so? Be a Berean. Allow the Bible to answer the question of whether it condones or condemns same-sex relations. Go read the Bible for yourself. Start from Genesis 1 and read straight through to gain context on the relevant statements. See which explanation of the Bible stands up to examination.

Other chapters in this book will respond to what Vines says about the New Testament, about church history, and about sexual orientation. This chapter focuses on how Vines interprets the Old Testament. In what follows I will seek to sketch in the wider story and thought world in which we are to understand the sin of Sodom in Genesis 19, the command not to lie with a male as with a woman in Leviticus 18:22, and the death penalty for those who do in Leviticus 20:13.

The Old Testament’s Explanation of the World

Authors communicate by showing and telling. Once they have told, when they go on to show they don’t have to re-tell. In other words, as a writer introduces his audience to the world in which his story is set, if he tells them that world includes the earth’s gravitational force pulling objects toward itself, he does not have to reiterate that explanation when he shows a plane crash. The author does not need to interrupt the narrative and remind his audience about gravity.

Anyone who understands this will question the interpretive skill of the person who isolates the account of the plane crash from the wider narrative, then attempts to prove that gravity did not pull that plane to the earth because, after all, the author did not mention gravity when he narrated the plane crash. Of course, if that interpreter does not like gravity, if he is committed to denying the influence of gravity in his own experience, we can understand why he argues as he does, but we will not be convinced. After all, the author did tell us that his world included gravity, and nothing in his story ever went floating off into space.

This example about gravity is precisely the way that sexual complementarity—an idea that Vines acknowledges and then dismisses as irrelevant—functions in the Bible.

The story-world in which the Bible’s narrative is set, of course, is presented as the real world, and the narrative that unfolds in the Scriptures is world’s true story. Moreover, the teaching of the biblical authors is without error, normative, and authoritative because God inspired the biblical authors by his Spirit (2 Tim 3:16; 2 Pet 1:20–21). This is the view that Jesus took of the Old Testament (John 10:35), and followers of Jesus think as he did.

Genesis 1–3 introduces the story-world, the setting and moral parameters, of the Bible’s narrative and our lives. This is a world that God made (Gen 1–2). Prior to human sin everything was good (Gen 1:31), and as for humanity, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27). Whatever people in other ancient societies may have thought about the inferiority of women, those who embrace Genesis 1 believe that men and women are equal in human dignity because God made male and female in his own image (Gen 1:27).

At several points Vines asserts that whereas those who hold to complementarity today hold that men and women have different roles but are equal in value, “in the ancient world, women . . . were thought to have less value” (94, cf. 89–96, emphasis his). Anyone who thinks women inferior is either ignorant of or has failed to appreciate Genesis 1:27.[1] When Moses and other biblical authors addressed same-sex relations, they had not forgotten Genesis 1:27.[2]

God made the world good, and he made both male and female in his image, equal in dignity. Genesis 1:28 also teaches that God created the sexual complementarity of male and female to enable them to do together what they could not do alone: “God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. . .’” The author who put Genesis 1 next to Genesis 2, Moses, intended the two accounts to be read as complementing one another. In Genesis 2, God gave to man the role of working and keeping the garden (Gen 2:15), and to the woman he gave the role of helping the man (2:18, 20). What took place when God presented the woman to Adam in the Garden of Eden (Gen 2:22–23) is understood as normative for all humanity in Genesis 2:24, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”

Answering a question about divorce in Matthew 19:4–5, Jesus quotes Genesis 1:27, “male and female he created them,” then Jesus quotes Genesis 2:24, “Therefore a man . . .”[3] Significantly, Jesus attributes the words of Genesis 2:24 to the one who made them male and female. Jesus asserts that God himself declared that what happened between Adam and Eve was determinative for mankind in general. When Matthew Vines argues against the idea that Genesis 1–2 teaches that procreation is a fixed standard for marriage (140–44), and when he argues that sexual complementarity is not required for the one flesh union (146–49), he sets himself against the understanding of Genesis 1–2 articulated by Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus said that God the Father created them male and female (Gen 1:27), and Jesus said that God the Father concluded from the union of Adam and Eve that man should leave father and mother and cleave to his wife, the two becoming one flesh (Gen 2:24; see Matt 19:4–5).[4] Matthew Vines does not interpret Genesis 1–2 the way Jesus did. The interpretation of Genesis 1–2 provided by Jesus is the one that binds the conscience of Christians.

Prior to sin, prior to the curses spoken in Genesis 3:14–19, God instituted marriage as a permanent, exclusive covenant between one man and one woman, and the one flesh union of their bodies brings about a biological miracle neither could experience without the cooperation of the other: the begetting of children, procreation. Marriage is referred to as a creation ordinance because God made it in the garden prior to sin as a moral norm for all humans at all times in all places.

Rather than dropping into Genesis 19 or Leviticus 18 and 20 without consideration of the story world Moses has constructed from the beginning of his work, and rather than reading these passages through the categories and assumptions of other ancient cultures or our own, we must read Genesis 19 from the perspective Moses meant to teach. We cannot understand Genesis 19 or Leviticus 18 and 20 apart from Genesis 1–3.[5]

Prior to sin, there was no shame between man and woman (Gen 2:25). After sin, they hid their nakedness from one another (3:7). When God spoke judgment over sin, he cursed the serpent (3:14–15), and he made the roles assigned to the woman (3:16) and the man (3:17–19) more difficult. God’s words to the woman in Genesis 3:16 provide the explanation of all marital disharmony, all sexual perversion, and all procreative dysfunction—not only in the rest of Genesis but in the rest of the Bible. That foundational word of judgment also explains the perversion, dysfunction, and disharmony experienced across world history.

God made the world good (Gen 1:31). Man and woman sinned (3:6). God spoke judgment (3:14–19), subjecting the world to futility in hope (Rom 8:20). Deviations from the norm, therefore, such as what Moses narrates in Genesis 19 or prohibits in Leviticus 18 and 20, are to be understood as departures from the created order.

Like the author who does not have to mention gravity when he narrates the plane crash, because in Genesis 1–3 Moses has told his audience about the world in which his story takes place, when he shows them what happens in Genesis 19 he does not have to spell everything out. Similarly, with the created order stated in Genesis 1–3, when God gives commands in Leviticus that reflect the created order, those commands do not need to articulate the undergirding sexual complementarity. It has already been established. Vines makes specious claims: “the Bible never identifies same-sex behavior as the sin of Sodom, or even as a sin of Sodom” (77), and regarding Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 he demands that we ask, “Do these writings suggest that same-sex unions are wrong because of the anatomical ‘sameness’ of the partners involved?” (89). It is as though Vines asks, does the author specify that gravity pulled that plane to the ground?

Read in context, the commands against same-sex relations in Leviticus 18 and 20 mesh perfectly with the moral order of creation presented in Genesis 1–2, correctly interpreted by Jesus in Matthew 19:4–5. This indicates that Moses intended the intentions of the men of Sodom to be viewed as flagrant violations of God’s created order, as can be seen from the way later biblical authors interpret Genesis 19.

Vines suggests that Philo was the first to interpret the sin of Sodom as a same-sex violation. He argues that later biblical authors only speak of inhospitality and violence, arrogance and oppression when referencing Sodom. Vines also holds that the gang-rape intended by the Sodomites cannot be compared with the kind of committed, consensual same-sex marriage relationship he advocates. Rape is obviously a violation of what God intended, but that does not mean that the same-sex aspect of Sodom’s sin was not also a violation of God’s intention. As for later Old Testament interpretation of Sodom’s sin, Vines has failed to notice—or chosen not to address—a significant connection between Genesis 19, the two passages in Leviticus, and Ezekiel 16:48–50.

Ezekiel, who makes abundant use of the book of Leviticus, describes various sins of Sodom (Ezek 16:48–49), then concludes, “They were haughty and did an abomination before me. So I removed them, when I saw it” (16:50). This indicates that the “abomination” committed by Sodom led to their destruction. Ezekiel’s reference to Sodom’s “abomination” uses the singular form of the term toevah, and that term is used in the singular only twice in the book of Leviticus, when same-sex intercourse is called an abomination in 18:22, and when the death penalty is prescribed for it in 20:13. The four other instances of the term in Leviticus are in the plural, making it likely that Ezekiel uses the term from Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 to reference the same-sex intentions of the men of Sodom.[6]

Jude also speaks of “sexual immorality” and the Sodomites’ pursuit of “strange flesh” (Jude 7). Vines tries to explain away this mention of “strange flesh” as referring “to the fact that the men of Sodom attempted to rape angels instead of humans” (71). But the Genesis narrative refers to the angels as “men” (Gen 18:22), and that is how the inhabitants of Sodom designate them as well (19:5). For those who adopt the sexual complementarity taught in the Bible, the violation of the order of creation at Sodom is an abomination (Lev 18:22; 20:13; Ezek 16:50). That abomination is only intensified by the angelic identity of the men the Sodomites intended to abuse. 2 Peter 2:6–10 also treats the sin of Sodom as sexual immorality rather than as oppression, violence, a failure of hospitality, or some other kind of sin.

The Sodom story in Genesis 19 shows the destruction of those who have deviated from the Bible’s authorized sexual norm, and the prohibition of deviation from that norm is made explicit in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13. Vines suggests that these Old Testament prohibitions are part of the law that has been fulfilled in Christ (80–85), attempting to buttress this with the argument that Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 “reflect the inferior value that was accorded to women” (96). In spite of what Moses wrote in Genesis 1:27, Vines alleges that Moses thinks women inferior to men. Moreover, in spite of what Moses established about the order of creation in Genesis 1–3, Vines argues that the problem with same-sex relations was not that they violated sexual complementarity but that they violated the gender roles appropriate to a patriarchal society because the act reduced the passive partner to the status of a woman.[7]

In addition to misrepresenting Moses, Vines does not account for the punishment that fits the crime in Leviticus 20:13. If Vines is correct, the problem with same-sex relations is that the man who plays the active role has degraded the man who plays the passive role, lowering him to the status of a woman. This understanding would make the active partner the more guilty,[8] and this degradation in patriarchal society is crucial to the distinction Vines draws between what Leviticus condemns and today’s same-sex relations between equals (cf. p. 132).

Leviticus 20:13, however, does not say that only the active partner has sinned, nor does it say that only the active partner is to be punished. If it did, it might support the idea that the nature of the sin was the degradation of the passive partner to the inferior status of a woman. But Leviticus 20:13 punishes both active and passive partners asequals: “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.”[9]

The punishment in Leviticus 20:13 sheds light on Leviticus 18:22, “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.” The abomination here is not the degradation of a man to the status of a woman, as Vines would have it.

What is it that makes these practices abominations? The Bible’s answer is that Yahweh’s holy character determines what is holy and common, clean and unclean (e.g., Lev 10:10–11, cf. 10:1–11; 18:2; 20:8). The Old Testament law was an expression of Yahweh’s holy character. The new covenant law is likewise an expression of Yahweh’s holy character. Because Yahweh’s character has not changed, and because the proscription on same-sex activity is reiterated in the New Testament (Rom 1:26–27; 1 Cor 6:9–10; 1 Tim 1:10), Vines is wrong that “while ‘abomination’ is a negative word, it doesn’t necessarily correspond to Christian views of sin” (88). On the contrary, in the Old and New Testaments, sin is an affront to God’s holy character and should be viewed with abhorrence and detested.

There are statements that treat forbidden food as an abomination, such as Deuteronomy 14:3, “You shall not eat any abomination.” There are also sexual regulations not all Christians follow today (some do), such as Leviticus 18:19, “You shall not approach a woman to uncover her nakedness while she is in her menstrual uncleanness.” With cases like these we see a difference between the old and new covenant expressions of God’s righteous character. Under the old covenant, God’s unmixed purity was to be reflected in what Israel ate. With the coming of the new covenant, Jesus “declared all foods clean” (Mark 7:19), and God told Peter not to call common what he had made clean (Acts 10:15). The regulation about menstrual uncleanness reflects the way that under the old covenant people became unclean by contact with life fluids that had left the body, explaining why childbirth (Lev 12) and other bodily discharges (Lev 15) made people unclean. Whereas the prohibition on the abomination of same-sex activity is reiterated in the New Testament, statements about uncleanness resulting from contact with life fluids that have left the body are not reiterated in the New Testament. Other moral verities, such as the command not to offer children to Molech (Lev 18:21) and the command not to lie with any animal (Lev 18:23), do not need to be reiterated to remain in force.

Conclusion

Has Matthew Vines thrown the knockout punch to the biblical norm? Has he refuted the view that the only expression of human sexuality the Bible endorses is that between one man and one woman in marriage? Has he defeated the view that the Bible regards all indulgence of same-sex desire sinful?

In view of his logical fallacies, his failure to account for the big story that frames Genesis 19, Leviticus 18, and Leviticus 20, and his suggestion that the Old Testament presents women as inferior to men in spite of their Genesis 1:27 equality, I would say that Matthew Vines is not even in the ring. His attack on the Bible’s teaching is ultimately an attack on the one who inspired the Bible, God.

In view of the way that Jesus authoritatively interpreted Genesis 1:27 and 2:24 in Matthew 19:4–5, the attempt of Matthew Vines to overthrow the Bible’s teaching is more like a kid on the street trying to sucker punch the champ. The Bible’s teaching, however, is untouched by the arrogant attempt to lay it low.

—

[1] Creation narratives produce estimations of value. Vines quotes Greek and Roman authors on the inferiority of women, which follows naturally from their story of the creation of women: “In his poem ‘Works and Days,’ Hesiod presents the creation of woman as a punishment against both Prometheus and man. Prometheus had stolen fire from Zeus, who was unwilling to give it to men himself, so Zeus punished Prometheus and man by making woman. Hesiod presents Zeus announcing to Prometheus, ‘you are glad that you have outwitted me and stolen fire—a great plague to you yourself and to men that shall be. But I will give men as the price for fire an evil thing in which they may all be glad of heart while they embrace their own destruction.’ Zeus then bids Hephaestus to ‘make haste and mix earth and water and to put in it the voice and strength of human kind, and fashion a sweet lovely maiden-shape . . . . And he charged Hermes the guide, the Slayer of Argus, to put in her a shameless mind and a deceitful nature’” (James M. Hamilton Jr., God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment: A Biblical Theology [Wheaton: Crossway, 2010], 72–73; quoting from Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, 7).

[2] Vines cites lower vow redemption prices for women in old covenant Israel (Lev 27:1–8) and other differences (94), but these can be explained the same way that lower wages for women in our own culture can be. They do not necessarily indicate that women were deemed inferior as human beings: differences in economic valuation of men and women in that culture and our own likely result from other factors.

[3] The fact that Jesus read Genesis 1:27 and 2:24 together in Matthew 19:4–5 speaks against what Vines asserts, “While Genesis 1:28 does say to ‘be fruitful and increase in number,’ Genesis 2 never mentions procreation when describing the first marriage” (143). The connection between marriage and procreation, however, is so obvious it does not need to be stated. When Jesus speaks of the resurrection of the dead and says that the raised “neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven” (Matt 22:30), part of his point is that in the resurrection, as with the angels, there will be no procreation, so there will be no marriage.

[4] On the issue of polygamy, the Greek translation of Genesis 2:24 reads, “the two shall become one flesh,” and this is the way that Jesus quotes the passages in Matthew 19:5. The Hebrew of Genesis 2:24 does not specify two, reading simply “they shall become one flesh.” Still, every instance of polygamy in the Old Testament is presented in a negative light, indicating that the Old Testament authors understood Genesis 2:24 as the later Greek translator did and as Jesus authoritatively interpreted the text: pointing to the union of one man with one woman in marriage.

[5] So also Gordon Wenham (“The Old Testament Attitude to Homosexuality,” Expository Times 102 [1991]: 362): “It is now generally recognized that many of the most fundamental principles of Old Testament law are expressed in the opening chapters of Genesis. This applies to the laws on food, sacrifice, the sabbath as well as on sex.”

[6] For discussion and defense of this understanding, see Robert A. J. Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics (Nashville: Abingdon, 2001), 79–85.

[7] Vines claims that this explains “why Leviticus contains no parallel prohibition of female same-sex relations. If the issue were anatomical complementarity, female same-sex relations should be condemned on an equal basis. And yet, the text is silent in this matter” (93). Against this, the Old Testament laws are not and could have been an exhaustive list. The commandments and prohibitions are clearly representative, on the understanding that applications from what is addressed could be made to what isn’t. Thus, nothing is said about female same-sex activity because nothing needs to be said. The prohibition of male same-sex activity obviously prohibits female same-sex activity.

[8] Gordon Wenham (“The Old Testament Attitude to Homosexuality,” 360) points out that in Middle Assyrian Law 20, only the active partner is punished, while “The passive partner escapes all censure.”

[9] Wenham writes, “the Old Testament bans every type of homosexual intercourse, not just forcible as the Assyrians did, or with youths (so the Egyptians). Homosexual intercourse where both parties consent is also condemned” (ibid., 362).

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In his book God and the Gay Christian, Matthew Vines assumes that he is correct to call sin righteous, slanders the Bride of Christ, and speaks as though sin produces lasting joy when he writes,

“the church’s condemnation of same-sex relationships seemed to be harmful to the long-term wellbeing of most gay people. . . . Same-sex relationships, however, did seem to be creating long-term fulfillment for gay people. By condemning homosexuality, the church seemed to be shutting off a primary avenue for relational joy and companionship in gay people’s lives” (13, emphasis his).

Let’s work through the assertions in this statement:

First, the church has not issued this condemnation. God did that by inspiring the biblical authors to write what they did. The church is not at fault for holding to what the Bible says.

Second, the concern expressed here for “long-term fulfillment” is not long-term enough. Vines wants a committed same-sex relationship that, if he lived long enough, might last him 60 years. We who call sinners to repentance want for them a relationship with Jesus the bridegroom that will last the next 60 million years and beyond. We do not want them to spend that time suffering God’s wrath in hell.

As for a same-sex relationship being a “primary avenue for relational joy and companionship,” Christians are given the example of Moses, who chose “rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin” (Heb 11:25). Sin does not lead to lasting pleasure, however appearances might deceive us.

In reality, Christians who live out and bear witness to what God has commanded are lovingly calling people to come out of darkness into the light. It is not loving to leave people in their sin. It is not loving to leave them to face the almighty indignation of the God whose holiness they have flaunted. It is not loving to leave them hurtling toward a confrontation with the wrathful Judge.

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Jonathan Merritt hosted a “conversation” between Albert Mohler and Matthew Vines, but it wasn’t really a conversation. Mohler and Vines answered questions Merritt posed. Merritt gives the last word to Vines, awarding him the Proverbs 18:17 advantage, “The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.”

Matthew Vines seems winsome: his words scratch just where today’s ears itch. But what a convenient thing to have the opportunity to turn Proverbs 18:17 back on him here. Let’s examine his talking points.

Addressing whether the controversy will bring division, Vines writes, “By focusing firmly on Scripture from an evangelical theological framework, I’m doing my best to help repair the existing divides rather than exacerbate them.”

This turns the whole situation on its head! Vines is causing division, not repairing it. Vines is exacerbating disunity rather than healing it.

Followers of Jesus want a unity that would please Jesus. Since Jesus gave instructions about calling sinners to repentance (Matt 18:15–18), and since he prayed for his followers to be sanctified by the truth of God’s word (John 17:17), we know that the unity that would please Jesus is the kind of unity that results from his followers accepting what the Bible says, obeying it, and repenting when they transgress.

In our response to his book, and in the other ways we have engaged him, we are calling Matthew Vines to return to Jesus. We want him to experience the mouth-stopping mercy there for all who repent of sin. We want him to stop causing division and embrace the unity of the church in the truth of the Scriptures. God’s forgiveness is big enough for those with same-sex desires.

To overcome the idea that his view would reverse 2,ooo years of church history, Vines trots out the example of Galileo (failing to appreciate what that episode really teaches) to support his claim that the biblical authors weren’t addressing sexual orientation, as though a new consensus on sexual orientation has brought about a new copernican revolution. As Heath Lambert shows in his chapter, however, an orientation is defined by the APA as “an enduring pattern . . . of attractions . . .” How does the Bible not address that? The definition Lambert cites, by the way, is more of a definition than Vines ever offers. Vines assumes that his view of orientation is obvious and correct, while Lambert shows the development of this concept and notes that the APA modestly confesses that there is much about “orientation” not yet known or understood. How can Vines speak of a consensus on this issue?

One further point on this matter: Vines writes as though the fact of a sexual orientation justifies the legitimacy of acting in accordance with that orientation. Remarkably, however, a recent feature on NPR dealt with the way that those oriented toward pedophilia recognize that they cannot allow themselves to act on their orientation. Why should some orientations be embraced if others must be repudiated? There must be some moral standard used to answer this question, and in the history of humanity a traditional understanding of marriage has prevailed. For Christians, the Bible stands as God’s revelation of his absolute moral standard.

Merritt asks whether the death penalty prescribed in the Old Testament reflects the heart of God then or now. Vines comments on how many Old Testament punishments seem harsh to us today, suggesting that the harsh conditions of life back then made tribal unity more necessary. To Vines, and to Merritt, the answer to the question is simple. The author of Hebrews writes, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb 10:31), and the same author later explains, “for our God is a consuming fire” (12:29). This does not mean that the New Testament reiterates the Old Testament’s death penalties for particular sins; it does not. It does mean that the heart of God is passionate to uphold his own holiness. God built the world, and he has the right to give commands and prohibitions. The heart of God is to be true to what he himself has said. We may not keep our word, but God keeps his. All sinners stand under his judgment, and that is what makes the mercy of God in Christ so precious. All sinners who turn from sin to trust Jesus will receive that mercy. Sinners who refuse to turn from sin and try to have Jesus too have in fact chosen their sin. We want Matthew Vines to have mercy, and that’s why we’re engaging him and his book.

On what Paul wrote in Romans 1, Vines claims that Paul was not addressing sexual orientation. Denny Burk’s critique of Vines on this point is devastating. It can be found on pages 46–49 in the response book. Vines is wrong about Paul not addressing orientation (see above, and see the essays by Lambert and Burk), and he is wrong about Romans 1:26–27, as will be obvious to anyone who reads the verses, which defend themselves:

“God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error” (Rom 1:26–27).

On whether churches should welcome those who commit this sin and do not repent, Vines says, “Of course.” Then he goes on to suggest that churches have not been willing to listen to those struggling with these issues. What Vines does not seem to understand is that the New Testament is clear that churches are to accept all who repent and trust Christ. I know many Christians, and I say with confidence that Christians will listen for as long as any sinner wants to go on talking. I also know many churches, and the doors of those churches are open to all sinners to come and hear the gospel of Jesus Christ, the good news that he has paid the penalty for sin so that all who repent and believe will be saved. Those who believe the Bible, however, will maintain that all sinners must repent of their sin to be saved.

As a parting word, Vines asks us to listen, to turn down the volume, and to respect and value one another’s faith. In response, I say this: we are listening, and we have read and are reading. What I have heard is bad exegesis riddled with logical and rhetorical fallacies that give rise to sentimental appeals to emotion that call us abandon the only hope any sinner has of being saved–the hope in the good news that if we repent and believe God will accept us in Christ.

Our rejection of your failed argumentation does not mean we are not listening.

Are you listening?

Are you willing to reconsider your interpretation of the Bible?

Are you willing to acknowledge the errors in your arguments?

We want you to embrace the truth and be saved. For that to happen you must reject the errors in your thinking and turn from your sin and trust wholly in Christ.

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In his book God and the Gay Christian, Matthew Vines wrongly suggests that the view that same-sex relations are sinful is a bad tree bearing the bad fruit of hurt feelings in the lives of people dealing with same sex attraction. He bases this argument on a misreading of Matthew 7:15–20, and on his bad exegesis he builds a bad argument: Vines urges people to use “an experience-based test” to prove that this fruit is bad.

Vines claims that “the earliest Christians used a similar, experience-based test when making what was one of the most important decisions in church history: whether to include Gentiles in the church without forcing them to be circumcised and obey other particulars of the Old Testament law” (15).

The fundamental difference, however, between the kind of “experience-based test” the early church used and the one Vines wants people to use makes this an example of the logical fallacy of a false analogy. Bad exegesis supported by logical fallacies don’t make for good arguments, but this is all Vines can do to support his case that the “bad view” produces “bad fruit.”

What happened in Acts 10, 11, and 15 can hardly be called an “experience-based test” at all. No one was consulting the feelings of Gentiles. No one asked those under pressure to be circumcised how the Judaizers were making them feel.

What was “experienced” was something that God did: God gave the Spirit to the Gentiles apart from circumcision (Acts 10:44–45; 11:15–18; 15:5–11).

The important thing in Acts is what God did not how anyone felt.

This is very different from the “experience-based test” Vines advocates. He encourages those who would advocate his position to “bring the focus back to the people affected by the church’s stance” (179–180). Vines is unwilling to acknowledge that “the church’s stance” only reflects what God has commanded. Vines argues: “If someone is convinced that same-sex relationships are sinful, encourage them to consider what the viewpoint means for gay Christians” (180).

Would we respond to a thief, an adulterer, a drunkard, a swindler, or a liar this way?

What God’s commands mean to all sinners is the same: they can repent and be delivered from the consequences of their sins by what Christ has done on the cross, or they can choose to remain in their sin and face the wrath of God.

You will have to choose between Jesus and your sin. If you choose your sin, the Bible’s condemnation of that sin is not at fault.

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The new book by Matthew Vines, God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships (you read that oxymoron right) releases today, and simultaneous with its release comes a book conceived and edited by R. Albert Mohler Jr., God and the Gay Christian? A Response to Matthew Vines.

Dr. Mohler wrote the introduction, I had the privilege of responding to the way Matthew Vines attacks the Old Testament, Denny Burk to his attempt to explain away the New Testament, Owen Strachan to his misuse of church history, and Heath Lambert gives the lie to what Vines says about sexual orientation. As my remit in the e-book was the OT, I must comment on what he does with the NT here.

Matthew Vines has failed to understand the teaching of Jesus in Matthew 7:15–20.

The first chapter of God and the Gay Christian is entitled “A Tree and its Fruit” (5–21) and here Vines quotes Matthew 7:15–20 (15). He is mistaken both in his understanding of the text and in the use he makes of it.

Vines passes over the fact that Jesus is talking about people—false prophets—when he uses the tree metaphor (Matt 7:15). Jesus teaches his followers that false prophets are like trees. Just as you can tell whether you are dealing with a good or bad tree from the fruit it bears, so you can tell whether you are dealing with a true prophet or a false prophet by the fruit he bears, by what he says and does (7:15–19). So when Jesus says, “Thus you will recognize them by their fruits” (7:20), he means that his followers will be able to discern between true and false prophets.

If we ask how the followers of Jesus are to evaluate what is good or bad fruit, true or false teaching, the answer is simple: the Bible determines what is good and bad, true and false, right and wrong. So we simply ask of the teaching of anyone who would explain the Scriptures: does their message align with the teaching of the Scriptures?

In the repeated appeals that Vines makes to what Jesus says about a tree and its fruit he always treats a view (that all same-sex relations are sinful) as the tree and how that view makes people dealing with same-sex attraction feel as the fruit (cf. 20–21). He writes, “Today, we still are responsible for testing our beliefs in light of their outcomes—a duty in line with Jesus’s teaching about trees and their fruit” (16).

Testing the results of believing the Bible is not the duty enjoined by what Jesus said about trees and fruit. The duty Jesus enjoined is that of recognizing false prophets by the bad fruit they bear, and that bad fruit usually involves trying to lead God’s people into sexual immorality and idolatry.

Vines has subtly assumed the conclusion that embracing his view (that committed same-sex relationships are not condemned by the Bible) would bear good fruit.

Ironically, the very text that Vines appeals to speaks against his whole project. The Bible has identified what Matthew Vines tries to accomplish through his book as “bad fruit.” A tree (a person) who bears bad fruit is a person who transgresses God’s commands and advocates that others do the same. This is exactly what Matthew Vines is about, doing exactly what Jesus warned his followers against in Matthew 7:15–20, and by doing this Vines sets himself up to experience what Jesus describes in Matthew 7:21–23,

‘Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, “Lord, Lord . . .” And then I will declare to them, “I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

What does it mean to be the kind of “worker of lawlessness” Jesus says he will dismiss from his presence? Doing lawlessness is doing what God says not to do! To break God’s commands in the Bible is to work lawlessness. To advocate that others are free to do what God forbids in the Bible is to work lawlessness. To claim that affirming and supporting workers of lawlessness “is indeed a requirement of Christian faithfulness” (183, emphasis original) is to work lawlessness.

The Bible teaches that those who work lawlessness will feel guilt, shame, and fear.
The Bible teaches that those who would escape the guilt, fear, and shame that results from their sin must repudiate their sin and trust in Jesus, whose death on the cross paid the penalty for sin.
Those who repent of sin and trust in Christ then find their identity not in their sin but in Christ.

Jesus is everything to them.

Any time guilt, fear, or shame for past failures and sins returns, followers of Jesus look to the glory and purity and sufficiency and love of Jesus to find refuge and relief.

Followers of Jesus do not argue that what the Bible forbids as sinful behavior should be endorsed as righteous conduct by the people of God.

I pray that Matthew Vines will repent.

Matthew Vines, if you are reading this, I plead with you to repent. The wrath of God stands over you. Please turn from your sin.

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In my contribution to the e-book God and the Gay Christian? A Response to Matthew Vines, I suggest that Vines has made pervasive use of logical fallacies. The following is a sampling of the logical and rhetorical fallacies Vines employs. This list could easily be lengthened, almost indefinitely.

Vines has assumed the conclusion that embracing his view, that committed same-sex relationships are not condemned by the Bible, would bear good fruit (e.g., p. 15).

Vines uses a false analogy in his appeal for an “experience based test” to show that the view that all same-sex relations are sinful bears bad fruit in the lives of people with same sex attractions. Vines claims that the early church determined theology on the basis of an “experience based test” when they concluded Gentiles did not need to be circumcised (p. 15). The analogy does not hold.

The approach that Vines takes to sexual orientation is a case of persuasive definition that leads him to give a positive answer to his own question: “Does new information we have about homosexuality also warrant a reinterpretation of Scripture?” (27; cf. p. 43). The problem with this, however, is that an orientation can be understood differently than Vines does.

Vines wants to avoid labels and find respectful ways to describe Christians who believe everything the Bible teaches, but the terms he uses nevertheless shift the discussion away from the fact that the Bible condemns the indulgence same-sex desires and makes an ad hominem attack on Christians who believe the Bible’s teaching. Vines makes this ad hominem argument by referring to those who hold the Bible’s teaching as non-affirming (p. 27–28) and suggesting that the church has harmed gay people by believing the Bible (cf. e.g., 13, “the church’s condemnation of same-sex relationshiops” –picture me politely raising my hand at this point to say, “um, excuse me, I think it was God who uttered the condemnation”). This makes Christians the issue rather than God or the Bible. Of course, it’s a lot easier to direct an ad hominem argument at Christians than to aim one of those at God or his word.

Vines presents a false choice when he writes, “The debate over gay Christians requires us to do one of two things: change our understanding of celibacy or change our understanding of marriage” (59–60). Illustrating the way his logical and rhetorical fallacies are often interwoven with each other, to create this false choice, Vines has misrepresented how Christians have understood celibacy, using a persuasive definition. The two possible action steps he gives are not, however, the only options, and his understanding of celibacy is inaccurate, as is his view of what counts as marriage.

Vines pursues a false dichotomy in his whole discussion of the sin of Sodom, where he seems to assume that if the Sodomites are guilty of inhospitality, violence, arrogance, etc., they cannot also be guilty of the flagrant violation of the created order seen when the men of Sodom want to “know” the men visiting Lot. Vines writes, “But this is not an expression of sexual desire. It is a threatened gang rape. . . . Agression and dominance were the motives in these situations, not sexual attraction” (67). False dichotomies and red herrings in both sentences.

Vines asks a loaded question that creates unrealistic expectations when he writes, “But do any biblical texts that directly mention same-sex behavior describe it as a violation of God’s complementary design for men and women?” (68–69). The biblical authors communicate this reality, though they do not employ the words Vines here asks whether they use. Though we do not find the words, we do find the concepts in the biblical texts. By asking for the modern terms, however, Vines makes it seem as though the answer to the question will be negative when in fact it is positive.

Vines engages in an etymological fallacy in his comments on the Greek text of Jude 7 when he writes, “the Greek phrase used in Jude 7 is sarkos heteras—literally, other or different flesh. ‘Hetero,’ of course, is the prefix for words like heterosexuality, not homosexuality. Far from arguing the men of Sodom pursued flesh that was too similar to their own, Jude indicts them for pursuing flesh that was too different” (71). The English term heterosexuality, of course, has nothing to do with the phrase commonly translated “strange flesh” in Jude 7, so there is no valid etymological connection here. The use of this information in this way is therefore irrelevant to what Vines is discussing, yielding yet another example of a red herring.

Addressing the “abomination” (Heb. toevah) of lying with a male as with a woman in Leviticus 18:22, Vines uses a red herring, engages in self-contradiction, and forces a false dichotomy. He writes, “In the vast majority of cases, toevah refers to idolatrous practices of Gentiles [red herring], which has led Old Testament scholar Phyllis Bird to conclude that ‘[i]t is not an ethical term, but a term of boundary marking,’ with ‘a basic sense of taboo’” (87). Can something that is taboo be so easily separated from ethics? That would be a false dichotomy, since taboos are typically unethical. Here, too, Vines has engaged in self-contradiction, for when he argued against the traditional distinction between moral and ceremonial laws he insisted that “all the laws would have been moral laws” (84). Now, however, he seems to suggest that what Leviticus 18:22 identifies as an abomination is not necessarily unethical/immoral.

In Revelation, John writes as one in affliction (Rev 1:9), to churches in affliction (e.g., 2:10, 13), about the affliction that will take place before kingdom come (see esp. Rev 11–13). The contention of this essay is that John sees the affliction in which he is a “brother and fellow partaker” (1:9) as the outworking of the Messianic Woes that must be fulfilled prior to the consummation of all things. To establish this, we will begin with a summary of the indications of end times tribulation, the Messianic Woes, in Daniel, cross-pollinating this discussion with consideration of how various New Testament authors interpreted Daniel, before considering how John interprets these realities in Revelation. In this essay, I am attempting to do biblical theology by pursuing the interpretive perspective of the biblical authors. As followers of Jesus, once we understand the perspective he taught his apostles, our responsibility is to make their perspective our own.

Augustine’s argument about what really brought Rome down could be spoken of today’s world power:

Well may they scoff, utter scamps and railers as they are, far from truebred sons of those very Romans even, who have to their credit many glorious feats for which they are honoured in the book of history. Nay, they are headlong foes to the renown of their ancestors. Truly they had made the name of Rome, that Rome that was conceived and nourished by the pains of their elders, sink lower while she stood than ever it sank when she fell, forasmuch as in her fall were overturned but stones and timbers, while in their way of living were overturned all the ramparts and splendours, not of mural, but of moral strength. Deadlier were the lusts that raged in their hearts than the flames that raged in their city’s edifices.

Tis the season when the books of the year are being announced, and in that spirit here at For His Renown I’m inaugurating The Issachar Award, so named for the reference in 1 Chronicles 12:32 to the “the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do” (NAS).

The Issachar Award goes to the book that best understands the most crucial issues facing the church and most faithfully communicates the truth of the Scriptures on these issues for the good of God’s people and the glory of God.

10. The meaning of sex–that word referring to both the distinguishing of the human species as males or females and the act whereby man and wife are physically united as one–is under attack today, and the attack on the nature of sex as God created it comprises the most controversial issue the church now faces.

9. The question of the meaning of sex–again, what it means to be male and female and what that means for marriage–has become the canary in the coal-mine for the question of Religious Liberty. The freedom to worship and to live in accordance with the dictates of conscience is under threat because of the efforts to revise the meaning of sex.

8. These realities make the meaning of sex one of the biggest evangelistic hurdles Christians face as we seek to communicate the gospel to unbelievers.

7. The reality that every human is either male or female makes the meaning of sex foundational to our identity as human beings.

6. Our culture desperately needs men who are manly in Christ-like ways, with ladylike women who are the crowning glory of God’s creation, as the Scriptures teach.

5. Like Hitler seeking to demoralize the British in the Blitz, Satan’s concentrated attacks on the meaning of sex make this the most intense point of the raging onslaught, the line where the battle flames hottest, the place we must stand in the ongoing spiritual warfare. Satan pursues his attacks on the meaning of sex through sexual temptation, growing persecution, and false allegations of bigotry, all of which urge Christians to shut up, to refrain from confessing the truths of Scripture on these issues.

4. Traditional marriage is hands down the best program for advancing social justice, for helping others, for loving our neighbors, for ensuring the academic success of children, for protecting kids against drugs and predators and gangs and whatever else. The meaning of sex is therefore basic to the best social program that could be advanced for children in underprivileged areas. Traditional marriage is also the best protection for unborn children and at-risk mothers in this lusty, bloodthirsty land.

3. More important than anything said to this point is the glorious truth that marriage as God created it to be is a mini-drama of the relationship between Christ and the church. Marriage is about the gospel. The meaning of sex impinges directly on the meaning of the gospel.

2. This book teaches that sex is for the glory of God.

1. This book will tell you what the Bible says about these most disputed questions, questions whose answers will determine the kind of world in which our children will live: whether they will retain the free exercise of religion, what kind of moral norms and expectations will permeate the atmosphere, and the accessibility of the gospel in this society.

The future of western civilization depends on what kind of answer we give to the question What Is the Meaning of Sex? For the gospel, for the children, for the culture, for the glory of God, we need to know how the Bible answers that question. For all these reasons, this year’s Issachar Award goes to Denny Burk for his book What Is the Meaning of Sex? published by Crossway Books.

Congratulations to Crossway Books and Denny Burk on winning The Issachar Award for 2013.

I shall henceforth refer to What Is the Meaning of Sex? as an “award winning book,” and when speaking of Denny Burk I will freely use the phrase “award winning author.” I would encourage you to do the same, and if you don’t yet have a copy of the book, the linked title above will take you to Amazon where you can remedy that deficiency.

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Greg Thornbury, President of King’s College, nails it in this interview with Forbes. Commenting on how Christians can be relevant to our culture, Thornbury says of the post WW2 situation:

‘Those who looked in the face of totalitarianism and fascism and a century of holocaust and said, “What are the ideas that keep people free?” The point that I was making was that Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdomwas a bestseller. It was pulp nonfiction. They were selling it at supermarkets in the middle of the war; it went through fifteen pressings in the UK. In other words, it answered a fundamental question: what is going to get you through the blitzkrieg? What do you want to have in your hands when you come out of the underground by dawn’s early light? What’s going to steel you in courage to think that, “We’re going to get through this!” It is this notion that after this is over we are going to be able to reboot society on the basis of liberty, and consecrated self-direction, and the kinds of things that lift people out of the bog of collectivist notions that led, certainly, Germany and Italy to the most gruesome and bloody century ever known to man. I see my role as the president of The King’s College as re-enchanting a new generation with those animating ideals that once made Western civilization great in general, and American society distinctive in particular.’

Amen. In the introduction to God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment: A Biblical Theology, I quote Vanhoozer on the point that “the fate of hermeneutics and humanity alike stand or fall together” (39). My attempt to demonstrate the unity of the Bible is my humble contribution to the broader effort to save the west that Thornbury articulates so well. The Bible is the foundation for meaning in this world. Destroy its unity and chaos results. Its coherence, however, stands against all the slanders made against it.

Then Thornbury is asked: “Should a Christian be a Hayekian? Do you see overlap there?” He replies:

‘I definitely see overlap for this reason: I think that when you study the texts of particularly the New Testament, although it has its origins in the Mosaic Law, I think what you see there is the seedbed of freedom of conscience. You see democratic religion in the pages of the New Testament. So whereas some people in Acts chapter 5 see some kind of nascent socialism, actually what you’re seeing is free people electing to gather together in solidarity around key principles and ideals and goals, and the people who joined in that were people like Lydia. There was a mercantile aspect to the early Christian movement. When I read Hayek and I see his argument for the link between private property and freedom, I see a direct line going all the way back to those pages of the New Testament, because what the Apostle Paul and others were representing was an alternative to totalitarianism. When you look at the Apostle John – and whatever else you think the Book of Revelation says about the future—what it definitely was, was the greatest political protest letter ever penned in the history of the world, because he was saying, “The state has no business telling us how we should govern our own life together.” And when I say “society” or “culture”, here’s how I’m defining that, Jerry: I take a nineteenth century definition by Johann Herder, who many recognize as the founding father of modern sociology. He said, “Culture is the lifeblood of a civilization. It’s the flow of moral energy that keeps a society intact.” So, when I see Hayek talking about making sure that we stay free of tyranny, I see the entailments of that going all the way back to the emperor and Domitian and the Apostle John.’

Indeed. This is exactly what you see poignantly in Revelation 13 and other places. More here.

Christianity Today has interviewed Denny about the book. Here’s a bit of the first exchange:

So. What is the meaning of sex?

The reigning sexual ethic reflects a tongue-in-cheek lyric from Sheryl Crow: “If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad.” This worldview affirms any and all attempts to get sexual pleasure so long as such attempts do not harm others. If it feels good and you’re not hurting anyone, how could it possibly be wrong? Many people see no larger purpose for sex. They have severed their sexuality from the objective order that God has created, and they have lost sight of God’s purpose for our sexuality. So when people ask what they should or shouldn’t do sexually, they are asking a question about purpose—whether or not they realize it.

When Paul commands us to glorify God with our bodies in 1 Corinthians 6, he may as well have said, “Glorify God with your sex.” He clearly has in mind the use of the body for sex, so the ultimate purpose of sex must be the glory of God. To enjoy sex for God’s glory is to enjoy it in the way God has determined.

If the Supreme Court takes up these cases, it should soundly reject the warped view that some employers can get out of complying with the new law, and in effect use their religious beliefs to discriminate against women.

Got that? You thinking you can avoid being coerced into this is “warped” and you’re trying to “get out of complying” with the requirement that you pay for other people’s “contraception.” Moreover, thinking that this is something you don’t want to pay for is discriminating against women.

Note that it’s not discriminating against men, since only women are responsible, evidently, for contraception. How is that view not discriminating against women? How is it not discriminating against women to hold them solely responsible for something that could not have happened without a man?

What about the discrimination against human dignity, morality, self-control, and uprightness inherent in the assumption that the people who have this “right” to have their employees provide contraception coverage will not be married, will not be able to take responsibility for these decisions themselves, will not want children, and so on?

Remember: these are “liberals,” and here “liberal” doesn’t mean free. It means “free to think and do what we tell you to think and do.”

And if you don’t like what we tell you to think and do? Your views are “warped.” You’re trying to “get out of complying” (as though you’re obviously shirking your duties). And you are using your “religious beliefs to discriminate against women.”